1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a program deployment apparatus and method and is suited for use in, for example, a management server for managing physical servers and virtual servers set on the physical servers (hereinafter referred to as “virtual servers”), in a server system.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, various servers and server virtualization products exist at data centers. Various methods for managing those servers and server virtualization products have been suggested. As one example of such a management method, a method of deploying a server management program called an “agent program” to physical servers and virtual servers provided on the physical servers, both of which are targets to be managed, and installing the program on the physical servers and the virtual servers has been widely employed.
When deploying the agent program to the physical servers and the virtual servers in the above-described case, a system administrator has to assume a large burden of, for example, judging whether or not the platform for the physical servers and virtual servers is of the type to which the agent program can be deployed, and also judging which agent program from among the different kinds should be deployed.
As a means for solving the above-described problem, a technique of selectively installing an appropriate program to a remote client existing on a network and a technique of installing desired software on computers of different models have been suggested (Japan Patent Laid-Open (Kokai) Application Publication No. 2007-58664 and Japan Patent Laid-Open (Kokai) Application Publication No. 2000-276332).
Users of servers installed at data centers wish to minimize the use of memory resources for server management in consideration of costs and other factors. If virtual servers are active on physical servers, some users accept installing a management program on virtual servers used directly for their services, but avoid installing such programs on physical servers not used directly for the services. Therefore, an operation for server management to deploy the program only to the virtual servers and not to the physical servers is required in the above-described case.
However, the techniques disclosed in Japan Patent Laid-Open (Kokai) Application Publication No. 2007-58664 and Japan Patent Laid-Open (Kokai) Application Publication No. 2000-276332 are based on the premise that a program is deployed to all the remote clients and computers existing on a network. So, the conventional art has a problem of being unable to selectively deploy a program, as described above.